JPK Huson 1863
Brev. Brig. Gen'l
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2012
- Location
- Central Pennsylvania
Sure, it's a romantic image. Women, men, lace, ringlets, fans and cravats, silk slippers and long-tailed coats. You can smell lavender hanging in the air, too. What we tend to miss is the social backdrop, expectations making a ball possible to be held at all. It was nice. Image above is a little pre-war, what's interesting is the time span where you find these. Not 150 years later though.
I'm not a huge advocate of pressing one's nose against history's window, stung by nostalgia for the ' Good Old Days '. BUT. Sometimes it's a good idea.
From a dance manual teaching people ' the art of the dance '. Around 1/3 of it focuses on this. What did dance and being pleasant have to do with each other? Apparently a LOT.
For all the incivility inherent in anything called ' war ', this one took place against a social backdrop of carefully laid down, maintained and rigidly adhered to norms. Etiquette can be misunderstood. It wasn't all white gloves and silly, uber ceremonious ritual. Etiquette was a way to rub elbows with each other and doing it well.
Illustration from the page teaching you how to dance the polka. Say what you will about current ball room dancing, there's a ton of cooperation in these steps.
Despite an entire war ( or maybe because of it ) balls and dances were held and for quite a few reasons. " In honor of " and " In celebration of ", openings, closings, holidays, fund raisers. Point being balls were a way of life. I'm not sure we understand how freakishly ( compared to 2020 ) civil the entire set up was. To GO to one of these events meant you knew a. how to dance b. and what the rules were, rules being etiquette- back to rubbing elbow together very, very well. IMO, we've forgotten.
It wasn't just the society's elite meeting on a regular basis , flaunting position and wealth. Balls were everyone's, anyone's; judging by the 10 balls I found advertised in one fairly small town newspaper, held at the drop of fan. That was nice, too. OK, so this one has a holiday attached- using it to illustrate who might be at the next one.
This may seem ' quaint ', overly ritualistic and stilted. Honestly, it isn't. Our expectations about how you interacted were so different 150 years ago it's too easy dismissing this kind of thing as ' quaint '. What it is, is lost, that's all. Rituals were a good thing. This cartoon pokes fun at how elaborate it became, down to getting dressed to go to the ball- but there really was a point and it worked.
It lampoons our tendency to go overboard, I'm unconvinced it was all bad. Even as over-the-top and elaborate it was just getting ready to go be elaborately civil to each other, it remains an illustration of how gosh darn seriously we took the idea rubbing elbows with each other was a serious business. You can find lengthy articles on civility in most issues of a single newspaper. That's worth getting nostalgic over.
There's around a gazillion instructional books on dancing. They're wonderful. Note they're not separate topics- you learned how to dance and behave well. There wasn't one without the other. Twins, not just siblings inside who we were.